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Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

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Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#141

My shoutout to Ghostty (by Mitchell Hashimoto & community). Although still in beta, hands down the best terminal I've used on both Mac and Linux.

Do you know the dev, or is there a waitlist somewhere where I could possibly get access to try it out? I couldn't locate one on their site.

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#142
post #42

What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?

I use Kitty, which is extremely fast, and I often avoid calling `tail` to print the end of a long log file: the terminal is so fast in displaying it that it's useless. Another case is when you mistakenly invoke a command that produces a lot of output. With Kitty, terminal output is so fast that the output ended before I could reach Ctrl+C.

I can't remember what the issue was exactly, but Kitty does something that makes it work not-so-nice when SSHing into some machines.

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#143
post #42

What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?

I have used Alacritty for a few years.

Right now I have about 20 open (in sway) and half of them are non-local SSH sessions... so pretty pointless. I only notice SSH latency when the VPN wobbles. Or throughput if I mis-cat a log file instead of using tail...

I complain like crazy if there is any latency in gaming so it seems I'm not latency sensitive in terminals :-) or more likely: reality tempers expectations.

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#145
post #4

i do prefer kitty[0] if i want a modern terminal emulator [0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty

Me too. Nothing beats the "CTRL + SHIFT + G" option (open last output in less); no other terminal has it.

I wrote something similar on top of TMUX and zsh. I use zsh hooks to dump the current TMUX pane to a file (/tmp/lastcmd) just before a new prompt is displayed; I also set variables $O1, $O2, ... to respective output lines. It never occurred to me to bind `less /tmp/lastcmd` to a key, though - good idea :)

(BTW: the problematic part was to make it fast enough not to be noticeable. The code that dumps the pane contents and searches for the start of the last output is written in Nim, in effect.)

It was possible in TMUX because it gives you programmatic access to the pane's content. It's probably possible to do the same with some terminals - urxvt uses Perl as an extension language, for example - but TMUX provides a compatibility layer, which means I don't need to rewrite the whole setup if I change the terminal emulator.

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#146
post #42

What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?

Presumably, the same "problem" that gold-plated HDMI connectors are solving.

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

urxvt and xterm are also fast terminals. The noticably slow ones are gnome-terminal, konsole, etc. They have pretty bad latency in the time between pressing a key and that letter appearing on screen.

Neither Konsole nor GNOME Terminal are as lean and fast as (U)XTerm, however on day to day use, I fail to see input latency on these. I generally use 60-80WPM depending on what I write and how concentrated I am, and there's no noticeable lag from my perspective. GNOME terminal was visibly slow in the days of yore, but given that the libraries powering these are already accelerated, I don't think the difference betwee…

To be fair I haven't tried gnome terminal in some years so maybe it's improved. I have used konsole (well, yakuake, but same thing) more recently and was minorly annoyed by the latency, particularly when scrolling in emacs/etc. I have since swapped out yakuake with kitty with tdrop for the "quake mode" effect.

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malicious distro packagers are virtually unheard of, and another set of eyes on the software is generally better. For instance, if the developer sells out the packager can save your bacon. This is especially true on Android where selling out is more common (see: the Simple Apps situation and F-Droid) but also a valid consideration on desktop Linux.

I wouldn't assume anything about distro packages really. It's a higher bar in some systems (like Debian), lower in some (like nixpkgs), but the time investment to be in a position to sabotage something is quite low overall and requires little skill. Then there are not-distro packages that they easily abused over time. For example sourceforge was a respected distributor of software for a long time and they moved to ad…

I stick to official distro packages from distros I like, mainly Debian and OpenSUSE. Community packages are too sketchy for me, and I consider downloading packages from sourceforge/etc to be a Windowism. And while it's possible for a malicious entity to infiltrate the ranks of distro packagers, I think the threat of the developer selling out has proven to be more likely.

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither Konsole nor GNOME Terminal are as lean and fast as (U)XTerm, however on day to day use, I fail to see input latency on these. I generally use 60-80WPM depending on what I write and how concentrated I am, and there's no noticeable lag from my perspective. GNOME terminal was visibly slow in the days of yore, but given that the libraries powering these are already accelerated, I don't think the difference betwee…

To be fair I haven't tried gnome terminal in some years so maybe it's improved. I have used konsole (well, yakuake, but same thing) more recently and was minorly annoyed by the latency, particularly when scrolling in emacs/etc. I have since swapped out yakuake with kitty with tdrop for the "quake mode" effect.

Yes, Yakuake uses the same Konsole framework, but they might lag behind in terms of framework version IIUC. Konsole supports more features than Yakuake and feels a bit smoother to me since I drive both daily.

Love to collaborate and make some tests with you, too.

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